Grafana vs Tempo: Key Differences & When to Use Each

Comprehensive side-by-side comparison of features, pricing, and metrics

Key Differences

Compare Grafana and Tempo across features, pricing, integrations, and community metrics. Grafana / Tempo.

Feature

Grafana

Monitoring

Tempo

Monitoring

Side-by-side comparison of developer tools
The open and composable observability and data visualization platform
Distributed tracing backend
GitHub Stars
⭐ 73,569
⭐ 5,232
Contributors
👥 3,006
👥 299
Pricing
✓ Free
Enterprise: Contact sales
✓ Free
Enterprise: Contact sales
Languages
TypeScript
Go
Features
  • • Alerting
  • • Analytics
  • • Business Intelligence
  • • Dashboard
  • • Data Visualization
  • • Distributed Tracing
  • • Grafana
Integrations
  • • prometheus
  • • grafana
  • • elasticsearch
  • • grafana
Momentum Score
94/100 (stable)
89/100 (slowing)
Community Health
95/100 (excellent)
30/100 (needs-attention)
Maturity Index
90/100 (mature)
20/100 (experimental)
Innovation Score
95/100 (pioneering)
13/100 (traditional)
Risk Score (higher is safer)
94/100 (minimal)
29/100 (high)
Developer Experience
80/100 (good)
16/100 (poor)
Links
🌐 Visit Website View on GitHub
🌐 Visit Website View on GitHub

Grafana Strengths

  • ✓ More popular (73,569 stars)
  • ✓ Larger community (3,006 contributors)
  • ✓ More features (5 listed)

Tempo Strengths

When to Use Grafana vs Tempo

Use Grafana when its strengths align better with your stack and team needs, and choose Tempo when its ecosystem, integrations, or cost profile is a better fit.

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Data source: GitHub API

Last updated: 5/4/2026